The Ohio Department of Transportation soon will post new signs with lower recommended speeds for a crash-prone ramp at the U.S. 24 and I-475/U.S. 23 junction in Maumee.
Signs now advising traffic to enter the ramp from eastbound U.S. 24 to southbound I-475/U.S. 23 at 50 mph and to take a sharper curve at the ramp’s bottom at 35 mph both will be reduced by 5 mph.
A twin of the second sign will be placed on the ramp’s left side, according to a plan drafted by staff in ODOT’s district office in Bowling Green. New arrows will also be placed at the initial curve near the ramp’s top and existing arrows near the lower, sharper curve will be replaced with larger ones, the plan shows.
"Based on our curve study and field review in March, 2022, the curve at the top of the hill should now be rated at 45 mph and the curve at the bottom of the hill should be rated at 30 mph,” said Chris Waterfield, ODOT’s district traffic engineer. “We will install new, larger warning signs to make them more noticeable and difficult to ignore."
Rhonda Pees, a regional ODOT spokesman, said the new signs originally were to be posted several months ago after the staff review, but “we had some personnel issues with our sign installers” that delayed these and other planned sign replacements in the Bowling Green district.
Besides the signs, ODOT has decided no further safety measures are needed at the U.S. 24 and I-475/U.S. 23 junction.
Five tractor-trailers overturned on separate occasions between March 13, 2021 and March 4 of this year on or just beyond the lower curve. Several of the wrecked semis slid across a collector lane within the freeways’ interchange and hit a wall separating that lane from the I-475 mainline. No other vehicles were involved in the crashes.
The most recent crash involved the only fatality. Despite wearing a seat belt, truck driver Randall C. Wolfe, 55, of Macks Creek, Mo., was partially ejected from his truck as it overturned on March 4. He died at Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center, where he was flown after the crash.
Sgt. Ryan Purpura, an Ohio State Highway Patrol regional spokesman, said that while several crashes have occurred on the ramp since then, none involved commercial vehicles or serious injuries.
After the first two of the five crashes, ODOT decided to change signs at the merge point between the descending ramp and the collector lane so that the ramp traffic would have the right-of-way. That, officials said earlier this year, made sense because drivers on the collector lane have a better view of traffic coming down the ramp than ramp drivers do of the collector lane.
Maumee Police Chief Joshua Sprow suggested in March that the state erect a truck rollover warning sign, which show the silhouette of a tipping truck trailer below a long arcing arrow, to supplement conventional curve signs.
Ms. Pees of ODOT said, “A truck rollover warning sign is an optional sign that has not typically been used in District 2, mainly because there’s no data from the Federal Highway Administration to support their use.”
ODOT’s “engineering team is methodical and data-driven in their decisions regarding sign placement,” she also said.
Sergeant Purpura noted in March, meanwhile, that the advisory speeds for the curves are not speed limits and not enforceable. The speed limit for the ramp is the same as that for eastbound U.S. 24 approaching it, he said: 65 mph.
First Published August 24, 2022, 6:35 p.m.
